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I don't see any advance in this debate since things that Dennett and Hofstadter wrote 20+ years ago (both independently and in their co-authored book "The Mind'

by ppod 9y ago

I don't see any advance in this debate since things that Dennett and Hofstadter wrote 20+ years ago (both independently and in their co-authored book "The Mind's I"). Is it really surprising that we have a first person subjective experience? We know that we are incredibly complex things, constantly integrating and acting on very complicated external stimuli. Such a system should have references to its own body and its own neural states, its train of reasoning should frequently include itself, its focus will drift forward and backwards in time... this is just how a system like this would work. If the system communicates about its state then its language should have referents to these internal states, referents like "experience", and "feels like", and "I understand". Is that surprising? Wouldn't it be surprising if it wasn't like that? I think that Tononi's approach is a good approximation, but it can't be a full solution because the word 'consciousness' is too anthropocentric. One criticism of IIT showed that a seemingly uninteresting complex artificial system could have a very high IIT complexity quotient. The problem is that the things we use to define the term 'consciousness' are things that can be approximated to varying degrees by chimps or dolphins or generative adversarial networks or antfarms or thermometers. But behind our use of the word 'consciousness' there is still almost always a very slightly disguised dualism that uses it as a substitute for the word 'soul'.

andrepd 9y ago
RE: second paragraph. But that explains, for example, the physical phenomenon of language. A complex system has reference points to itself, and structures in the brain organize to speak about things, including about itself, using terms like "experience" and "feels like, etc". But it does not explain the conscious "internal" phenomenon of language, of preparing a speech, of grasping for words, etc. See what I mean? Like p-zombies. Someone else describes their stream-of-consciousness. But that speech, those patterns in the brain, etc, are but a physical phenomenon. They tell us nothing about the subjective conscious experience. We could have a robot not have consciousness and replicate that speech the same.
- ppod 9y ago
  I don't see at all. You're just putting the word 'conscious' in italics. What I said was not only about language, language the reason we have words like 'conscious' and 'experience'. Why do we have the experience? It doesn't make sense to me to suggest that we wouldn't. Dynamic processing of internal representations and input is what intelligent systems do, ants, bats, chimps, and deep neural networks do it. Those processes obviously exist, and you call your own process your subjective conscious experience.

by ppod 9y ago

andrepd 9y ago

RE: second paragraph. But that explains, for example, the physical phenomenon of language. A complex system has reference points to itself, and structures in the brain organize to speak about things, including about itself, using terms like "experience" and "feels like, etc". But it does not explain the conscious "internal" phenomenon of language, of preparing a speech, of grasping for words, etc. See what I mean? Like p-zombies. Someone else describes their stream-of-consciousness. But that speech, those patterns in the brain, etc, are but a physical phenomenon. They tell us nothing about the subjective conscious experience. We could have a robot not have consciousness and replicate that speech the same.

ppod 9y ago
I don't see at all. You're just putting the word 'conscious' in italics. What I said was not only about language, language the reason we have words like 'conscious' and 'experience'. Why do we have the experience? It doesn't make sense to me to suggest that we wouldn't. Dynamic processing of internal representations and input is what intelligent systems do, ants, bats, chimps, and deep neural networks do it. Those processes obviously exist, and you call your own process your subjective conscious experience.